![]() Regardless of his own sexual identity - which may have been expressed in this preference - Winckelmann’s gender bias would go on to have an impact on white male supremacists who saw themselves as upholding an ideal. Not to mention Winckelmann’s pronounced preference for sculptures of gleaming white men over women. The ties between barbarism and color, civility and whiteness would endure. “Color in sculpture came to mean barbarism, for they assumed that the lofty ancient Greeks were too sophisticated to color their art,” Painter writes. Artists became fascinated with the statue after its discovery in the late 15th century, including Albrecht Dürer. The Apollo Belvedere, now at the Vatican Museums, was viewed in the 18th century as the model of beauty. Historian Nell Irvin Painter writes in her book The History of White People (2010) that Winckelmann was a Eurocentrist who depreciated people of other nationalities, like the Chinese or the Kalmyk. These books celebrate the whiteness of classical statuary and cast the Apollo of the Belvedere - a Roman marble copy of a Hellenistic bronze original - as the quintessence of beauty. He produced two volumes recounting the history of ancient art, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764), which were widely read and came to form a foundation for the modern field of art history. One of the most influential art historians of the era was Johann Joachim Winckelmann. At the same time, artists began to engage with mathematics and anatomy and to use classical sculpture as a means of addressing the question of replicable beauty through proportions. It was only a matter of time before humans were similarly subjected to such manmade systems of classification. What would later be termed the “scientific revolution” was marked by a desire to categorize, label, and rank everything from plants to minerals. ![]() In early modern Europe, taxonomies were all the rage. The Romans, in fact, did not define people as “white” where, then, did this notion of race come from?Ī painted Romano-Egyptian mummy mask of a man (late 2nd century CE), plaster, paint, glass, now at the Rhode Island School of Design (photo by the author for Hyperallergic) The assemblage of neon whiteness serves to create a false idea of homogeneity - everyone was very white! - across the Mediterranean region. ![]() ![]() This has an impact on the way we view the antique world. Most museums and art history textbooks contain a predominantly neon white display of skin tone when it comes to classical statues and sarcophagi. Where this standard came from and how it continues to influence white supremacist ideas today are often ignored. But the equation of white marble with beauty is not an inherent truth of the universe. A friend peering up at early-20th-century polychrome terra cottas of mythological figures at the Philadelphia Museum of Art once remarked to me: “There is no way the Greeks were that gauche.” How did color become gauche? Where does this aesthetic disgust come from? To many, the pristine whiteness of marble statues is the expectation and thus the classical ideal. (photo via Wikimedia under a CC BY-SA 2.5)Īcceptance of polychromy by the public is another matter. The Archer from the western pediment of the Temple of Aphaia on Aigina reconstruction, color variant A from the Gods of Color exhibit In particular, the archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann, whose research informed Gods in Color, has done important work, applying various technologies and ultraviolet light to antique statues in order to analyze the minute vestiges of paint on them and then recreate polychrome versions. (Many of the photos in this essay come from that exhibit, including the famed Caligula bust and the Alexander Sarcophagus.) Digital humanists and archaeologists have played a large part in making those shows possible. ![]() The Gods in Color exhibit travelled the world between 2003–15, after its initial display at the Glyptothek in Munich. It was carefully selected and then often painted in gold, red, green, black, white, and brown, among other colors.Ī number of fantastic museum shows throughout Europe and the US in recent years have addressed the issue of ancient polychromy. Marble was a precious material for Greco-Roman artisans, but it was considered a canvas, not the finished product for sculpture. Modern technology has revealed an irrefutable, if unpopular, truth: many of the statues, reliefs, and sarcophagi created in the ancient Western world were in fact painted. Now at the Baths of Diocletian Museum, Rome (photo by Carole Raddato, CC BY-SA 2.0). Stefano Rotondo, dating to the end of the 3rd century CE. Large polychrome tauroctony relief of Mithras killing a bull, originally from the mithraeum of S. ![]()
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